In a lecture Bernard Malamud once delivered at Bennington College, he tried to describe his writing process: ''I would write a book, or a short story, at least three times -once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose and a third to compel it to say what it still must say.''

In the early 50's I was reading Malamud's stories, later collected in ''The Magic Barrel,'' as they appeared - the very moment they appeared - in Partisan Review and the old Commentary. He seemed to me then to be doing no less for his lonely Jews and their peculiarly immigrant, Jewish forms of failure - for those Malamudian men ''who never stopped hurting'' - than was Samuel Beckett, in his longer fiction, for misery-ridden Molloy and Malone.

Bernard Malamud, the novelist and short story writer who won two National Book Awards and the Pulitzer Prize for his chronicles of human struggle, died yesterday at his Manhattan apartment. He was 71 years old.

Bernard Malamud's real gift is for the short story, for the spare, rigorous etching of solitary figures caught in the stress of adversity. When Malamud translates such figures into the novel, whose ampler dimensions lead us to expect development, he has difficulty in making his personages go anywhere except deeper into disaster.

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February 12, 2015, Thursday

The Big City Book Club returns for 2015, and we’re getting things rolling with Bernard Malamud’s classic New York novel “The Assistant.” Join us for the online discussion of the novel on Thursday, Feb. 12, at 6:30 p.m.